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Lecture explores role of Irish literature in world

Clare Kossler

Ph.D. candidate Kara Donnelly
discussed the role of Irish literature relative to other literary genres in the
lecture “Contemporary Irish Novels and World Literature in English: The Case of
the Irish Booker” at Flanner Hall on Friday.

Donnelly said she wanted to
examine specifically the influence of Irish literature on the world stage.

“Today I’d like to ask the
following question: ‘What is the relationship between Irish literature and
world literature in English?’” she said. “This question isn’t simply, ‘Can I
get a job in one of those fields?’… Rather, my question is when an Irish author
is active in international literary culture, how is she perceived and
classified?”

Donnelly said addressing this
question requires an awareness of the role of Irish literature in commonwealth
and post-colonial literature, both of which were intrinsic to the development
of world literary studies.

Irish literature was an
antecedent and “role model” to commonwealth literature, which in turn was a
“precursor to post-colonial studies and then to global Anglophone literary
studies,” Donnelly said.

Many of the anti-imperial and
anti-establishment themes of modern Irish literature were embodied in
commonwealth and post-colonial literary studies, and Irish literature
contributed to the development of world literature as a whole, she said.

“Indeed, the Irish authors were
part of the internationalizing trend,” she said.

Donnelly said part of the
international success of Irish literature can be attributed to the Man Booker
Prize, an award which “aims to promote the finest in fiction by rewarding the
best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the
Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland,” according to the prize’s website.

The significant number of Irish
novelists who have won the award have enhanced the presence of Irish literature
in international circles, a demonstration of “the globalization of the
publishing industry,” Donnelly said.

Irish literature is
fundamentally distinct from commonwealth and post-colonial literature, as well
as the broader category of world literature in English, however, Donnelly said.

“In the discourses about world
literature, Irish literature appears both too early and too late,” she
said. “It’s too early in the sense that
the oppositional models of world literature look to Irish modernism as antecedents
for their anti-imperial politics and aesthetics. It’s too late in the sense
that, on the international stage, it loses its national specificity in such a
way that it comes across as unmarked.”

"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth." T E Kalem - On Brendan Behan's 1958 play Borstal Boy, quoted in a Time advertisement, NY Times 17 Mar 79

He was born an Englishman and remained one for years. The Hostage

Algernon.
Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that?

Lane.I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

The Importance of being Earnest

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontier--for the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovina--it has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease. Dracula

"Shut your yelling, for if you're after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you're setting me now to think if it's a poor thing to be lonesome, it's worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth. The Playboy of the Western World

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. Larry Doyle toTom Broadbent. John Bull's Other Island, act1.

My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies; but the charge of maintaining me, although I had a very scanty allowance, being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr. James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued four years. My father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to do. When I left Mr. Bates, I went down to my father: where, by the assistance of him and my uncle John, and some other relations, I got forty pounds,and a promise of thirty pounds a year to maintain me at Leyden: there I studied physic two years and seven months, knowing it would be useful in long voyages. Gullivers Travels

Irish Lit

Irish Lit

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